Fueled by strong growth of both the iPhone and Android platforms and heavy application use on both mobile devices, mobile traffic increased 193 percent year-over-year in February.

The latest Mobile Metrics Report from ad firm AdMob was released Thursday, and showed the tremendous growth seen in the company's ads served to more than 15,000 mobile Web sites and applications around the world. In all, smartphones like the iPhone accounted for 48 percent of AdMob's worldwide traffic, well up from the 35 percent share it took in February 2009.

Apple remains the far-and-away leader in presence in the ad network. February 2010 numbers show the iPhone OS taking a 50 percent share of all worldwide smartphone operating systems. That number has held consistent since December of 2009, even as Android's presence continues to grow.

Google's Android mobile operating system represented 24 percent of the worldwide smartphone market online in February, up from 19 percent in December 2009. The February numbers were also a dramatic increase from a year prior, when smartphones with Google's operating system were just 2 percent of the market.

But Apple also saw a noteworthy increase year over year, with its 50 percent share up from just 33 percent of the market in February 2009.

While the iPhone and Android have seen big gains over the last year, the big loser, according to AdMob, has been Nokia's Symbian mobile platform. The survey found that Symbian's share of requests collapsed from 43 percent in February 2009 to 18 percent in February 2010.

Late last year, AdMob was approached by Apple for a potential acquisition, but the firm was eventually bought by rival Google. One recent report alleged that Google willingly overpaid in its $750 million acquisition of AdMob simply to keep the company away from Apple. But the iPhone maker quickly responded by purchasing mobile advertiser Quattro Wireless for $275 million.

Google's Android mobile operating system represented 24 percent of the worldwide smartphone market online in February, up from 19 percent in December 2009. The February numbers were also a dramatic increase from a year prior, when smartphones with Google's operating system were just 2 percent of the market.

But Apple also saw a noteworthy increase year over year, with its 50 percent share up from just 33 percent of the market in February 2009.

A business is an entity who's there to earn money. Google and Apple are both in the smartphone business. To grow Android, and earn money Google and its partners have to produce a device that gives the user a reason to go with it instead of the iPhone (in your words and something that's way overused, "kill it"). Same thing with the iPhone.

Easy, they aren't. They are competing with Apple, sure, but that doesn't imply trying to kill anything. To quote the very comment you were replying to:
"Both Apple and Google are very strong in the market neither has to fail for the other to do well."
How hard is that to understand?

"My 8th grade math teacher once said: "You can't help it if you're dumb, you are born that way. But stupid is self inflicted."" -Hiro.

I think extremeskater means a full monopoly on the market as a whole. Where you have no choice but to buy one company's products, regardless if you have a preference for something different. The end user would be at the mercy of whatever price points and release schedule that company wanted.

While Apple does have its niche in the high-end section of the computer market, it does not dominate the market as a whole. I can still buy my retail-packaged, Windows-based computers. Or I can build my own computer and then install whatever OS I want on it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by msantti

99% of Googles money is made on advertising. Hope that does not dry up.

And the stock price is ludicrous. Some think Apples is crazy.

As long as there are businesses, there will be advertising. That will never dry up.

Easy, they aren't. They are competing with Apple, sure, but that doesn't imply trying to kill anything. To quote the very comment you were replying to:
"Both Apple and Google are very strong in the market neither has to fail for the other to do well."
How hard is that to understand?

Agree.

From a legal standpoint, "killing" your competitors will result in a monopoly and anti-trust lawsuits.

From a competition/end-user standpoint, "killing" the competition means that innovation and new products go flat. Look at the market from pre-2007. Smartphones were mostly WinMo-based, considered an "exclusive" item for business users, and the carrier plans/phones were high.

Now look at the market after the iPhone. Smartphones have exploded into the everyday user area. You have your choice of OSs (iPhone, Android, WinMo/WP7S, Symbian) and form factors. Smartphone hardware and plan prices have dropped to more acceptable levels.

Competition is a good thing and Google and Apple can definitely be successful without having to kill each other off. Go forward in time and a new company with an even better OS/hardware combination will show up and spur progress further.

What has that got to do with traffic - seems to me you are making a rather large logic leap here. Share of operating systems does not equal worldwide mobile traffic.

Admob tracks ad requests from and ad impressions delivered to mobile devices from over 15000 web sites and applications. It determines which mobile devices are accessing those sites/using those apps. Each of these mobile devices are running an operating system. Thus, it can determine how often devices using a particular operating system are visiting web sites/using applications. From that, it can divide up the total number of ad requests across the devices (each with an operating system) and by summing, get a percentage (or share) for each operating system.

So devices using the iPhone OS (namely, iPhone and iPod touch) made 40% of the ad requests (or about 5.6B out of 14.1B) at those 15000 worldwide web sites/applications tracked in Feb 2010.

One recent report alleged that Google willingly overpaid in its $750 million acquisition of AdMob simply to keep the company away from Apple. But the iPhone maker quickly responded by purchasing mobile advertiser Quattro Wireless for $275 million.

Insiders have reported that right after he acquisition was formalized Steve, using a disposable phone reportedly dialed a private line of Mr. Schmidt's and soon has he answered Steve mocked and I quote: 'NANNY NANNY POO POO! NANNY NANNY POO POO!' before quickly hanging up, stomping on the disposable phone with his foot and rushing like a madman to the break room located on the other side of the building where he tried his best to look like everything was normal... The insider continued, "He wasn't fooling ANYONE, since he was clearly seen scarfing down a moon pie and drinking directly from the milk jug in the public fridge, while giggling uncontrollably.

Do these figures include the iPod touch as well, or just the iPhone "smartphone" ?

The 50% is just iPhone share of the smartphone market.

Adding in all mobile handsets (iPod Touch, PSP, DS, etc), Apple has 40%, with the iPhone accounting for 24% and iPod touch 16.1%. In third place is the Moto Droid with 3.8%. All the Android-based phones total up to about 11.5%.

The one thing the Admob studies do show is that there really is another class of phone, dubbed by Google as superphone, that is used to access the web. This class includes iPhone, Android-based phones and (maybe the Palm Pre/Pixi). If expanded to mobile handsets, it includes the iPod touch as well.

Conservatively, there might be about 50m iPhone/Android/WebOS handsets in use, and they account for 75% of requests. And there have been about 270 million Symbian, Blackberry, and WinMo smartphones sold over the past two years, and combined they account for the other 25%.

Note: Admob might disproportionately track iPhone and Android devices, although Symbian did account for a large share back in 2007-2008.

What plausible explanation would Apple have to recompile a bunch of critical core libraries with an unreleased, unproven, brand-new LLVM 2.7 compiler immediately prior to the release of OS X 10.6.3? Why wouldn't they simply stick this into the 10.6.4 release?

Please explain that.

This scenario that you originally proposed at MacRumors was terribly intriguing, but there is very little compelling reason to believe such a scenario.

Please present a solid argument why Apple would showstop a minor maintenance OS release to shoehorn a unproven compiler tool late into the build.

What is clear is we have a clash of claims if it is true that iPhone OS is now 50% of all Internet traffic.

A: They must be including iPod Touch
B: They aren't using Nokia's absurd notion of smartphone including millions of throw aways.

That's 50% of all smartphone Internet traffic as tracked by AdMob at its 15000 websites and applications. And it does include all Nokia's smartphones, such as the Nokia N70, N73, N95, 5800 Expressmusic, N80, E63, 6600, 6300, N72, 7610, E71, 6120c, 3230, 6630, 6210.

That's a bit of hyperbole from Jobs - part of a rah-rah pep rally speech to the troops.

The real message is that Google believes mobile is THE future, and that the handset is key to its future success because that will be what is used to access its search and advertising cash cow. Although Android started out as a way for Google to defend itself from Microsoft or Nokia dominance in the handset market, Google is now also defending against Apple becoming the dominant/majority handset and thus, Apple gaining leverage over Google and being able to increase friction in getting to Google's services.

It seems that Apple thought it was in a complementary partnership in that Apple offered Google prime real estate via Mail, Maps, and the search box in Mobile Safari on the iPhone. But Google's attempt to clone everything in the iPhone, including branding its own handset, makes it clear to Apple that there is no partnership, and that Apple rather than Microsoft or Nokia is the real Google cloning target.

The danger to Apple is that Google can subsidize the handset software and hardware with advertising revenue, thus, it can sell its handsets more cheaply to both carriers and directly to consumers. As Apple makes little to no profit from iTunes, App Store, or Mobile Me, it cannot subsidize. (Apple actually subsidizes its OS with handset sales.)

There are five parts to this chain: user device, OS, apps, services (including advertising), and the communication pipe. Google is doing what it can to commoditize everything except the advertising service (which is Google proprietary). With the acquisition of Placebase and Quattro, Apple looks like it is doing what it can to commoditize everything except the user device (and OS). Depending on what market it was in, Microsoft has tried to commoditize different things but always not the OS; it's unclear to me what it's strategy is in mobile. And Nokia looks to be using the Apple commoditization strategy - make money on the handsets, though it differs from Apple as Nokia aims to do this through large volumes instead of high margin, and commoditize everything else.

What has that got to do with traffic - seems to me you are making a rather large logic leap here. Share of operating systems does not equal worldwide mobile traffic.

The logic comes from analyzing the data. Admob said "we're getting x amount of hits from these websites with these smartphones. Last month we got y number of hits. Last year we got z number of hits. iPhone OS makes up 50% of these hits. Last year they were only 35%. That's an increase in their share of the hits."

They're not making the assumption that iPhones are 50% of the smartphones out there, but in terms of smartphone traffic to the sites they serve, iPhones hit it the most.

And out of context, your quote loses this:
"Apple remains the far-and-away leader in presence in the ad network."

See that? "in the ad network". That part is important. Not "in general mobile presence", or "in general mobile traffic", or even "in smartphone sales".

It might be gaining some traction after all. Of course there are caveats (the 3GS at the end of its life cycle for example, and the source might not be the most reliable). But it is impressive that a phone that's largely sold unsubsidized and unadvertised with no floor models at any carrier would beat the iPhone in any month, anywhere.

It might be gaining some traction after all. Of course there are caveats (the 3GS at the end of its life cycle for example, and the source might not be the most reliable). But it is impressive that a phone that's largely sold unsubsidized and unadvertised with no floor models at any carrier would beat the iPhone in any month, anywhere.

That site and article are questionable. I see nothing backing it up to show what metrics were included.

It looks like 3 sells the iPhone in Hong Kong and Macau but not in the UK. If they are going by their company stats alone then having more Nexus One's activated in February than iPhones doesn't seem unlikely.

PS: Naming your company '3' makes it tough to google.

Dick Applebaum on whether the iPad is a personal computer: "BTW, I am posting this from my iPad pc while sitting on the throne... personal enough for you?"